杏吧原创

THE dance language of honeybees is one of the best-studied examples of animal
communication. But a German researcher has now found that biologists have
overlooked a vital component: the dance floor.

J眉rgen Tautz of the University of W眉rzburg says that bees are much
more likely to get the message encoded by a nest mate鈥檚 dance if it takes place
on an empty honeycomb, rather than one filled with larvae. He will outline his
findings in next month鈥檚 Journal of Experimental Biology.

When a worker bee discovers a patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and
recruits helpers by dancing in a figure-of-eight pattern and vibrating her body
and wings. In 1973, Karl von Frisch of the University of Munich shared a Nobel
prize for showing that this 鈥渨aggle dance鈥� reveals the location and desirability
of the food source.

But other researchers have obtained less clear-cut results, leading some to
question von Frisch鈥檚 findings. Tautz says that these inconsistencies may
reflect differences in the bees鈥� dance floors.

Honeybees dance within 10 centimetres of the entrance to their nests, says
Tautz, irrespective of what is there. 鈥淚f you give them plastic, they will dance
on that.鈥� In natural colonies, the combs nearest the entrance are empty. But in
artificial hives, these combs can contain larvae.

Tautz trained marked bees to forage at a feeder containing a weak sugar
solution. He then increased the concentration of sugar so that the bees danced
on their return to the hive, and counted how many other bees visited the feeder
in the next two hours.

Only one-third as many bees turned up if the combs near the hive entrance
contained larvae. Tautz argues that vibrations, which are dampened by larvae,
must be a crucial part of the dance.